Book Image

Learning OpenStack Networking - Third Edition

By : James Denton
Book Image

Learning OpenStack Networking - Third Edition

By: James Denton

Overview of this book

OpenStack Networking is a pluggable, scalable, and API-driven system to manage physical and virtual networking resources in an OpenStack-based cloud. Like other core OpenStack components, OpenStack Networking can be used by administrators and users to increase the value and maximize the use of existing datacenter resources. This third edition of Learning OpenStack Networking walks you through the installation of OpenStack and provides you with a foundation that can be used to build a scalable and production-ready OpenStack cloud. In the initial chapters, you will review the physical network requirements and architectures necessary for an OpenStack environment that provide core cloud functionality. Then, you’ll move through the installation of the new release of OpenStack using packages from the Ubuntu repository. An overview of Neutron networking foundational concepts, including networks, subnets, and ports will segue into advanced topics such as security groups, distributed virtual routers, virtual load balancers, and VLAN tagging within instances. By the end of this book, you will have built a network infrastructure for your cloud using OpenStack Neutron.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Fundamentals of load balancing

A load balancer is an object that represents a virtual IP and is associated with a Neutron port. A virtual IP is often exposed to the internet and mapped to a domain name to provide access to an internet-facing load balanced service. Virtual IPs can also be created for services limited to internal clients. Traffic to the virtual IP is distributed among pool members and provides scaling and resiliency to the application.

There are four major components to a load balancer in Neutron:

  • Pool Member(s)
  • Pool
  • Health Monitor
  • Listener(s)

A pool member is a Layer 4 object that represents the IP address and listening port of a service or application. For example, a pool member might be a web server with a configured IP address of 192.168.0.2 listening on TCP port 80.

A pool is a group of pool members that typically serve identical content. A pool composed...